Greetings, forumites. I've one for you:

I was able to run Fallout 3 on reasonably high settings, with little problems, except in some few cases where I had to resort to V.A.T.S. to survive laggy battles. My laptop is truly old, but its specs were apparently enough for Fallout 3/Oblivion: 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, ATI X1600 256mb, 2 gigs of ram.

Seeing as New Vegas is built upon the same engine, I was hoping that the system requirements would at least be in the same universe, so to speak. I am fully expecting to have to lower the settings drastically, but I have this naive hope that I will at least be able to play New Vegas, somehow, somewhere.

Is there anyone here who either has similar hardware specs, or have a good understanding of the similarities and differences between Fallout 3's and New Vegas's system requirements, and who can either squash or bolster my hopes?

I will try to assist, although the only X1600s that I have ever handled belonged to friends / relatives for whom I was performing a system build or upgrade, and all are desktop systems. I do not believe in spending the kind of money that a truly game-capable laptop costs compared to desktops. My laptop goes on trips with me, in case I feel a strong need to check my eMail, or an auction on eBay I want to bid in while I am away from home. It can't play games. I didn't buy it to play games with.

The official minimum (desktop) Radeon is the same card as AMD's X1600 Pro, so if you know your own Mobile version's specifications, and can compare them with the desktop X1600, that should give you a good clue,

For anyone wandering into this thread by accident, be warned that once again, the Obsidian connection has resulted in extreme stupidity where the Geforce Graphics card minimum is concerned. Someone chose to use the term "Series" in a screwy manner unrelated to standard practice, and the fact that nVIDIA had done so themselves six years ago is no valid excuse.

Fallout 3 required a Geforce 6800, which was the TOP series out of four in the Geforce 6n00 generation. Obsidian has most certainly not improved the graphics optimization enough to change the Geforce 6200 and 6500 from being six year old crap into anything now usable. It is possible that the 6600 Vanilla card that wouldn't work for Fallout 3 may work for Fallout NV, assuming 256 MBs of VRAM (the 6600 GT never had more than 128 MBs on the desktop versions).

Along those same lines, here is my (edited) version of the list of video cards from the Fallout 3 readme file, in which the NORMAL usage of the term "Series" was used:

-Supported Video Card Chipsets:
ATI HD 4800 series
ATI HD 4600 series
ATI HD 3800 series
ATI HD 3600 series
ATI HD 2900 series
ATI HD 2600 series
ATI X1900 series
ATI X1800 series
ATI X1600 series
ATI X850 series

NVIDIA GeForce 200 series
NVIDIA Geforce 9800 series
NVIDIA Geforce 9600 series
NVIDIA Geforce 8800 series
NVIDIA Geforce 8600 series
NVIDIA Geforce 8500 series
NVIDIA Geforce 7900 series
NVIDIA Geforce 7800 series
NVIDIA Geforce 7600 series
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series

These next were named, erronneously, in the game's Readme file, and should not have been, unless the real minimum video cards should have been the Radeon X700 SE and the Geforce 6600 Vanilla cards (and the lowest grade 6800s also are too slow -- the SE and XT).

ATI HD 3400 series
ATI HD 2400 series
ATI X1300 series
NVIDIA Geforce G.210
NVIDIA Geforce 8400 series
NVIDIA Geforce 7300 series

Also, if the Geforce 7600 GS, and the X1600 Pro are good enough, so are most of the X800 Radeons, not including the SE and Vanilla versions (and if there was one, the GT).

I'm rather thinking the question was - "If I could play Fallout 3 at X frames per second, will F:NV play at X? X/2? X/10? Frames per second?". Going for the actual minimum specs, not much has changed, but to be honest, those things on the box rarely tell you whether the game will uphold to the merit or not.

The X1n00 Radeon generation is almost five years old now, and the Geforce 6n00 generation is already six years old, so most of those that got much use are worn out by now. The cooling fans have all definitely failed, that's certain. A laptop that old is also on its last legs, gamewise.

Incidentally (added in edit), here are the specifications, without benchmarks, for the Mobile X1600, the Reference Version from AMD/ATI, and the Reference Version of the desktop X1600 Pro, so that our OP will have a basis for comparsion with the version of the X1600 that he ended up having.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=453&card2=350